150 years after the Civil War, America still searches for racial redemption

“People always think there is going to be a point where we finally ‘get it.’ But the past leaves an imprint on us. It defines who we are, and not always in a good way. Redemption is an ongoing process.”

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A University at Buffalo historian who
credits the American culture of guns and violence to the Civil War
era, says the racial attitudes born of this period are so powerful
that the South may never redeem itself from its violent, invidious
history.

In “Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence and the American
South after the Civil War” (University of Chicago Press,
2013), Carole Emberton, assistant professor of history, digs into
the turbulent Reconstruction era to uncover the roots of the
bigotry and gun culture that continue to foment violence in 21st
century America.

Emberton says that at the end of the Civil War, the principal
concern of Southern freedmen was their redemption from lives of
slavery. Some looked forward to a fresh start as new citizens and
land owners and to the peace they hoped would mark the post-war
era.

What they found instead was continued violence, bigotry and
political oppression.

Emberton employs an array of archival material, including
documented interviews with and letters by former slaves, to trace
the meanings “redemption” held for different groups of
Americans as they tried to come to terms with the results of the
war and the changed social mores of a healing nation.

“I was concerned with how newly freed people negotiated
the dangerous landscape of the post-war South,” says
Emberton. “I wondered how people coped. How did people live
under the continual fear that they were going to be hunted
down?”

For freed African Americans, she says, the path toward full
citizenship lay with land and gun ownership, military service and
the vote. Land ownership marked them as independent, self-employed
men; and gun ownership provided them with the power to keep
would-be abusers at bay. Past military services indicated their
loyalty to the Union, from which they expected recognition and
recompense. The vote would give them control of their political
destiny.

Their pursuit of these very ends, however, provoked tremendous
rage toward them and toward the federal government that had
defeated the South, says Emberton.

“This ultimately led to the rise of a violent form of
white supremacy, a larger culture of gun ownership and ultimately
the defeat of Reconstruction itself,” she says.

During the Reconstruction period, even as black Americans sought
redemption through the exercise of their electoral rights, many
white Southerners, unable to tolerate being policed by federal
troops, some of which included black soldiers, tried to create
their own form of redemption by reasserting their dominance over
the land they once controlled though a political coalition called
the Redeemers, a southern wing of the conservative faction of the
Democratic Party, which at the time opposed many of the era's civil
rights reforms.

They, along with the paramilitary organizations they supported,
including the White League, the Red Shirts and Ku Klux Klan, sought
to reverse the Union victory by turning out Republican office
holders, terrorizing and killing former slaves, taking back their
property and suppressing their vote, Emberton says.

Southern whites used the barrel of a gun to beat back change and
in order for former slaves to defend their new rights – and
sometimes their lives – it was imperative that they, too, arm
themselves. Emberton points out that guns were anything but
scarce. American weapons manufacturing exploded in order to fuel
the Civil War, and to maintain production and profit, the leading
manufacturers – Colt, Smith and Wesson, Springfield and
Winchester – needed a new market.

The South was a tinderbox, and Election Day was all it took for
it to erupt. Voting booths became the setting for massacres even as
federal troops were used to enforce the right of African Americans
to vote and Southerners responded with violence.

“If you want to vote you had to be armed, because the
other side is armed,” she says. “It was a militarized
political culture where everyone brought their guns to the voting
booths.”

This culture provoked fear of crime as well, Emberton says. It
instilled in white Southerners the belief that men needed to
protect their homes and families from the violence they saw as
rampant right outside their doors. Although whites were largely
responsible for creating this culture of violence, they blamed
freedpeople for it. These fears still exist today and are often
expressed openly.

Given the issues of race and violence currently rattling the
nation, “Beyond Redemption” demonstrates why the author
holds that redemption from this violent past is far from
assured.

“People always think there is going to be a point where we
finally ‘get it,’” says Emberton. “But the
past leaves an imprint on us. It defines who we are, and not always
in a good way. Redemption is an ongoing process.”